Is Birdwatching Philosophical?
A Chestnut-Backed Chickadee, My Favorite Bird
Ever since I was a graduate student studying philosophy at the University of California, Santa Cruz, living in the Cypress Point Apartments adjacent to the Neary Lagoon, one of the best bird-watching locations in all of California, I have been interested in birds. It was at Neary Lagoon where I first became friends with the chestnut-backed chickadee, the Lesser goldfinch, the dark-eyed junco, even the Cooper’s hawk.
Neary Lagoon in Santa Cruz, California
As a philosopher, I naturally enjoy thinking about the nature of bird consciousness compared to human consciousness, an issue covered brilliantly and comprehensively by Jennifer Ackerman in her book The Genius of Birds. And I’m fascinated by how much progress has been made in our knowledge of the evolution of modern birds in the last 20 years or so, largely as a result of the great many prehistoric bird and feathered dinosaur fossils that have been discovered in China over the last couple of decades. (See A Field Guide to Mesozoic Birds and Other Winged Dinosaurs by Matthew P. Martyniuk for more on recent developments in the evolution of birds.)
But my question today is not about bird consciousness or avian evolution; it’s about the human activity known as “birdwatching” or “birding,” depending on whom you talk to. There is something almost mystical, religious even, about birdwatching, and about bird-feeding by extension. A bird is about as unlike a human you can imagine for a complex life form. Yes, birds are warm-blooded. Yes, birds are vertebrates. But the lives of most birds, soaring through the air on their own wings, is about as unlike the human life experience as you can find (although perhaps the life of an insect or a worm or a bacterium might be even more dissimilar to human life). And yet, day in and day out, numerous species of birds visit my bird feeders, partake of the bounty I have laid out for them, perhaps glance at me with the same curiosity with which I glance at them through my window, and fly away to resume the rest of their avian lives in the nearby trees and skies above.
Just as sailors of old used to talk about communing with mighty Neptune while at sea, I fancy myself to be communing with the many bird-god figures of ancient mythology while birdwatching:
Garuda, a bird creature from Hindu mythology, the mount of Lord Vishnu, depicted as having a human body with the head of a falcon or eagle
The ancient Egyptian god Horus, depicted as having the body of a man with the head of a peregrine falcon
Thoth, also from Egyptian mythology, a man with the head of an ibis.
Huitzilopochtli, the god of the sun and of war in Aztec theology, usually depicted as a hummingbird
Nekhbet in Egytpian mythology, depicted as a vulture
Hecate from Greek mythology, goddess of witches, depicted as an owl
The Native American Thunderbird, a supernatural bird responsible for storms, thunder, and lightning, a shapeshifter commonly depicted on totem poles
Morrigan, the Irish goddess of hunting, battle, and war, commonly depicted as a crow
Manannan Mac Lir, Celtic god of the sea, depicted as a gull
Unquestionably in the mythology of many, if not most, human cultures, birds have been imbued with some sort of divine or semi-divine qualities. Even in our disenchanted, scientific, post-Enlightenment, 21st-century age, we view birds with a kind of reverence, if sometimes overly clinical and from a distance.
The scientist who studies birds may have reverence for the unique qualities of birds as a category of living beings. They may marvel at birds’ unique abilities, such as the hummingbirds impressive ability to map the terrain over vast distances. They may learn impressive things about bird qualities ad bird evolution. But most of us nowadays, scientists included, don’t attribute any divine qualities to birds—except the birdwatcher, that is.
The birdwatcher does commonly express having a semi-divine or mystical connection with birds in the course of his or her birding activities. The birds don’t just visit our feeders; the birds become our alien avian friends, and we become theirs. A trans-species meeting of the minds and souls occurs every time a bird stops by to say “Hello,” if only for a bite and a bit of nonverbal communication, or perhaps communion.
Great Blue Heron Wading at Walden Pond State Park
Henry David Thoreau, the famous 19th-century American transcendentalist, used the words “bird” or “birds” 59 times in the course of his most famous work, Walden; Or, Life in the Woods. Although Thoreau himself was too modern a man, even despite his throwback tendencies, to consider birds literally to be gods or goddesses, he did hold that transcendent experiences of nature in general, and of birds in particular, are a special category of human experience with semi-divine attributes. In living among the birds alongside Walden Pond, both the divine nature of the cosmos and the reality of the natural world, which civilized society tends to gloss over, are revealed in the immediacy of the experiences.
Consider what Thoreau has to say about birds, if you’ll indulge me in the following selected passages from Walden despite their length:
The Harivansa says, “An abode without birds is like a meat without seasoning.” Such was not my abode, for I found myself suddenly neighbor to the birds; not by having imprisoned one, but having caged myself near them. I was not only nearer to some of those which commonly frequent the garden and the orchard, but to those wilder and more thrilling songsters of the forest which never, or rarely, serenade a villager,—the wood-thrush, the veery, the scarlet tanager, the field-sparrow, the whippoorwill, and many others. (Thoreau, Walden, Where I Lived and What I Lived For)
There is some of the same fitness in a man’s building his own house that there is in a bird’s building its own nest. Who knows but if men constructed their dwellings with their own hands, and provided food for themselves and families simply and honestly enough, the poetic faculty would be universally developed, as birds universally sing when they are so engaged? But alas! we do like cowbirds and cuckoos, which lay their eggs in nests which other birds have built, and cheer no traveller with their chattering and unmusical notes. Shall we forever resign the pleasure of construction to the carpenter? (Thoreau, Walden, Economy)
A bird sits on the next bough, life-everlasting grows under the table, and blackberry vines run round its legs; pine cones, chestnut burs, and strawberry leaves are strewn about. It looked as if this was the way these forms came to be transferred to our furniture, to tables, chairs, and bedsteads,—because they once stood in their midst. (Thoreau, Walden, Sounds)
Regularly at half past seven, in one part of the summer, after the evening train had gone by, the whippoorwills chanted their vespers for half an hour, sitting on a stump by my door, or upon the ridge pole of the house. They would begin to sing almost with as much precision as a clock, within five minutes of a particular time, referred to the setting of the sun, every evening. I had a rare opportunity to become acquainted with their habits. Sometimes I heard four or five at once in different parts of the wood, by accident one a bar behind another, and so near me that I distinguished not only the cluck after each note, but often that singular buzzing sound like a fly in a spider’s web, only proportionally louder. Sometimes one would circle round and round me in the woods a few feet distant as if tethered by a string, when probably I was near its eggs. They sang at intervals throughout the night, and were again as musical as ever just before and about dawn. When other birds are still the screech owls take up the strain, like mourning women their ancient u-lu-lu. Their dismal scream is truly Ben Jonsonian. Wise midnight hags! It is no honest and blunt tu-whit tu-who of the poets, but, without jesting, a most solemn graveyard ditty, the mutual consolations of suicide lovers remembering the pangs and the delights of supernal love in the infernal groves. Yet I love to hear their wailing, their doleful responses, trilled along the wood-side; reminding me sometimes of music and singing birds; as if it were the dark and tearful side of music, the regrets and sighs that would fain be sung. They are the spirits, the low spirits and melancholy forebodings, of fallen souls that once in human shape night-walked the earth and did the deeds of darkness, now expiating their sins with their wailing hymns or threnodies in the scenery of their transgressions. They give me a new sense of the variety and capacity of that nature which is our common dwelling. Oh-o-o-o-o that I never had been bor-r-r-r-n! sighs one on this side of the pond, and circles with the restlessness of despair to some new perch on the gray oaks. Then—that I never had been bor-r-r-r-n! echoes another on the farther side with tremulous sincerity, and—bor-r-r-r-n! comes faintly from far in the Lincoln woods. I was also serenaded by a hooting owl. Near at hand you could fancy it the most melancholy sound in Nature, as if she meant by this to stereotype and make permanent in her choir the dying moans of a human being,—some poor weak relic of mortality who has left hope behind, and howls like an animal, yet with human sobs, on entering the dark valley, made more awful by a certain gurgling melodiousness,—I find myself beginning with the letters gl when I try to imitate it,—expressive of a mind which has reached the gelatinous mildewy stage in the mortification of all healthy and courageous thought. It reminded me of ghouls and idiots and insane howlings. But now one answers from far woods in a strain made really melodious by distance,—Hoo hoo hoo, hoorer hoo; and indeed for the most part it suggested only pleasing associations, whether heard by day or night, summer or winter. I rejoice that there are owls. Let them do the idiotic and maniacal hooting for men. It is a sound admirably suited to swamps and twilight woods which no day illustrates, suggesting a vast and undeveloped nature which men have not recognized. They represent the stark twilight and unsatisfied thoughts which all have. All day the sun has shone on the surface of some savage swamp, where the single spruce stands hung with usnea lichens, and small hawks circulate above, and the chickadee lisps amid the evergreens, and the partridge and rabbit skulk beneath; but now a more dismal and fitting day dawns, and a different race of creatures awakes to express the meaning of Nature there. (Thoreau, Walden, Sounds)
To walk in a winter morning in a wood where these birds abounded, their native woods, and hear the wild cockerels crow on the trees, clear and shrill for miles over the resounding earth, drowning the feebler notes of other birds,—think of it! It would put nations on the alert. Who would not be early to rise, and rise earlier and earlier every successive day of his life, till he became unspeakably healthy, wealthy, and wise? This foreign bird’s note is celebrated by the poets of all countries along with the notes of their native songsters. All climates agree with brave Chanticleer. He is more indigenous even than the natives. His health is ever good, his lungs are sound, his spirits never flag. Even the sailor on the Atlantic and Pacific is awakened by his voice; but its shrill sound never roused me from my slumbers. I kept neither dog, cat, cow, pig, nor hens, so that you would have said there was a deficiency of domestic sounds; neither the churn, nor the spinning wheel, nor even the singing of the kettle, nor the hissing of the urn, nor children crying, to comfort one. An old-fashioned man would have lost his senses or died of ennui before this. Not even rats in the wall, for they were starved out, or rather were never baited in,—only squirrels on the roof and under the floor, a whippoorwill on the ridge pole, a blue-jay screaming beneath the window, a hare or woodchuck under the house, a screech-owl or a cat-owl behind it, a flock of wild geese or a laughing loon on the pond, and a fox to bark in the night. Not even a lark or an oriole, those mild plantation birds, ever visited my clearing. No cockerels to crow nor hens to cackle in the yard. No yard! but unfenced Nature reaching up to your very sills. (Thoreau, Walden, Sounds)
But since I left those shores the woodchoppers have still further laid them waste, and now for many a year there will be no more rambling through the aisles of the wood, with occasional vistas through which you see the water. My Muse may be excused if she is silent henceforth. How can you expect the birds to sing when their groves are cut down? (Thoreau, Walden, The Ponds)
White Pond and Walden are great crystals on the surface of the earth, Lakes of Light. If they were permanently congealed, and small enough to be clutched, they would, perchance, be carried off by slaves, like precious stones, to adorn the heads of emperors; but being liquid, and ample, and secured to us and our successors forever, we disregard them, and run after the diamond of Kohinoor. They are too pure to have a market value; they contain no muck. How much more beautiful than our lives, how much more transparent than our characters, are they! We never learned meanness of them. How much fairer than the pool before the farmer’s door, in which his ducks swim! Hither the clean wild ducks come. Nature has no human inhabitant who appreciates her. The birds with their plumage and their notes are in harmony with the flowers, but what youth or maiden conspires with the wild luxuriant beauty of Nature? She flourishes most alone, far from the towns where they reside. Talk of heaven! ye disgrace earth. (Thoreau, Walden, The Ponds)
Moreover, when at the pond, I wished sometimes to add fish to my fare for variety. I have actually fished from the same kind of necessity that the first fishers did. Whatever humanity I might conjure up against it was all factitious, and concerned my philosophy more than my feelings. I speak of fishing only now, for I had long felt differently about fowling, and sold my gun before I went to the woods. Not that I am less humane than others, but I did not perceive that my feelings were much affected. I did not pity the fishes nor the worms. This was habit. As for fowling, during the last years that I carried a gun my excuse was that I was studying ornithology, and sought only new or rare birds. But I confess that I am now inclined to think that there is a finer way of studying ornithology than this. It requires so much closer attention to the habits of the birds, that, if for that reason only, I have been willing to omit the gun. Yet notwithstanding the objection on the score of humanity, I am compelled to doubt if equally valuable sports are ever substituted for these; and when some of my friends have asked me anxiously about their boys, whether they should let them hunt, I have answered, yes,—remembering that it was one of the best parts of my education,—make them hunters, though sportsmen only at first, if possible, mighty hunters at last, so that they shall not find game large enough for them in this or any vegetable wilderness,—hunters as well as fishers of men. (Thoreau, Walden, Higher Laws)
A phœbe soon built in my shed, and a robin for protection in a pine which grew against the house. In June the partridge (Tetrao umbellus,) which is so shy a bird, led her brood past my windows, from the woods in the rear to the front of my house, clucking and calling to them like a hen, and in all her behavior proving herself the hen of the woods. The young suddenly disperse on your approach, at a signal from the mother, as if a whirlwind had swept them away, and they so exactly resemble the dried leaves and twigs that many a traveler has placed his foot in the midst of a brood, and heard the whir of the old bird as she flew off, and her anxious calls and mewing, or seen her trail her wings to attract his attention, without suspecting their neighborhood. The parent will sometimes roll and spin round before you in such a dishabille, that you cannot, for a few moments, detect what kind of creature it is. The young squat still and flat, often running their heads under a leaf, and mind only their mother’s directions given from a distance, nor will your approach make them run again and betray themselves. You may even tread on them, or have your eyes on them for a minute, without discovering them. I have held them in my open hand at such a time, and still their only care, obedient to their mother and their instinct, was to squat there without fear or trembling. So perfect is this instinct, that once, when I had laid them on the leaves again, and one accidentally fell on its side, it was found with the rest in exactly the same position ten minutes afterward. They are not callow like the young of most birds, but more perfectly developed and precocious even than chickens. The remarkably adult yet innocent expression of their open and serene eyes is very memorable. All intelligence seems reflected in them. They suggest not merely the purity of infancy, but a wisdom clarified by experience. Such an eye was not born when the bird was, but is coeval with the sky it reflects. The woods do not yield another such a gem. The traveller does not often look into such a limpid well. The ignorant or reckless sportsman often shoots the parent at such a time, and leaves these innocents to fall a prey to some prowling beast or bird, or gradually mingle with the decaying leaves which they so much resemble. It is said that when hatched by a hen they will directly disperse on some alarm, and so are lost, for they never hear the mother’s call which gathers them again. These were my hens and chickens. (Thoreau, Walden, Brute Neighbors)
Thither, too, the wood-cock led her brood, to probe the mud for worms, flying but a foot above them down the bank, while they ran in a troop beneath; but at last, spying me, she would leave her young and circle round and round me, nearer and nearer till within four or five feet, pretending broken wings and legs, to attract my attention, and get off her young, who would already have taken up their march, with faint wiry peep, single file through the swamp, as she directed. Or I heard the peep of the young when I could not see the parent bird. There too the turtle-doves sat over the spring, or fluttered from bough to bough of the soft white-pines over my head; or the red squirrel, coursing down the nearest bough, was particularly familiar and inquisitive. You only need sit still long enough in some attractive spot in the woods that all its inhabitants may exhibit themselves to you by turns. (Thoreau, Walden, Brute Neighbors)
For a week I heard the circling, groping clangor of some solitary goose in the foggy mornings, seeking its companion, and still peopling the woods with the sound of a larger life than they could sustain. In April the pigeons were seen again flying express in small flocks, and in due time I heard the martins twittering over my clearing, though it had not seemed that the township contained so many that it could afford me any, and I fancied that they were peculiarly of the ancient race that dwelt in hollow trees ere white men came. In almost all climes the tortoise and the frog are among the precursors and heralds of this season, and birds fly with song and glancing plumage, and plants spring and bloom, and winds blow, to correct this slight oscillation of the poles and preserve the equilibrium of Nature. As every season seems best to us in its turn, so the coming in of spring is like the creation of Cosmos out of Chaos and the realization of the Golden Age. (Thoreau, Walden, Spring)
At last, we know not what it is to live in the open air, and our lives are domestic in more senses than we think. From the hearth to the field is a great distance. It would be well perhaps if we were to spend more of our days and nights without any obstruction between us and the celestial bodies, if the poet did not speak so much from under a roof, or the saint dwell there so long. Birds do not sing in caves, nor do doves cherish their innocence in dovecots. (Thoreau, Walden, Economy)
Unquestionably Thoreau felt a type of kinship, albeit a distant one, with his new avian friends on and around Walden Pond. In birds we see not only nature’s wildness but also its glory and its grandeur. We can either tear down the homes and playgrounds of our avian friends to build our modern cities and suburbs, or we can let the birds have their homes while carving out a modest dwelling for ourselves amidst and among them. We can hunt, kill, and eat the birds, or we can let them be, not just watching the birds but communing with them both reverently and worshipfully.
Birdwatching may be a relatively passive activity, but it is active in its respect and awe, and immersive in its inaction. Yes, we can philosophically evaluate bird consciousness, attempting to take the third-person, God’s-eye point of view in our understanding of the natural world and its emergent mysteries of consciousness, whether human consciousness or avian consciousness. But we can also experience the birds transcendently just as sailors were in awe of the sea, perhaps fearfully so, in their communion with the creatures of the sea, seeing mighty Neptune in the waves and whales alike.
So is birdwatching itself a kind of philosophical activity? If you count Thoreau and his fellow transcendentalists as genuine philosophers (some don’t, sadly), then it would seem so. Unfortunately contemporary philosophers sometimes have a too-narrow view about what counts as properly philosophical. “If there are no arguments given, how can it be philosophy?” these too-narrow philosophers sometimes say. But why must we constantly argue about and sometimes with nature, whether about the creatures that inhabit it or about the qualities of our experience and communion with nature? Can we not learn something from nature more directly through our senses and rational faculties than through the relatively clumsy words and philosophical terms and categories—the “veil of philosophy” as one might call it?
If you are already a birdwatcher/birder, I am likely preaching to the proverbial choir. You likely already attribute a semi-religious quality to your communion time with your avian friends, worshipping the divine in the natural world with both eyes and feathers. Perhaps you count the various kinds of birds that visit your feeders, or perhaps journal about your experiences of them. Perhaps you are part of a scientific study of birds such as Project FeederWatch of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Perhaps you are simply an animal-lover of all sorts, whether birds or squirrels or your own household pets. Whatever your approach to birdwatching, try to imbue your birding time with both philosophical and religious reverence. Marvel at the diversity of nature and the way in which we can cross the barriers of species and sky to become friends with the finch and the chickadee, with the starling and the jay, and indeed with all of nature and the divine mysteries it embodies and reveals . But, in your attempt to analyze, study, and philosophize about nature, and about birds in particular, make sure you are also being and becoming their friend as well, conversing silently with them in the stillness of the dawn or dusk as the they drop by your home for a visit—or as you make your home among theirs as Thoreau says we have already done.
For Further Reading:
The Genius of Birds by Jennifer Ackerman
Walden; Or, Life in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau
